You give me more credit than my noob-ass to audio deserves. I was more along the lines addressing the modern day DIY and people with some electrical literacy and basic understandings. The people you allude to are bygone era fossils that are a generation away from being put into the ground along with their laughable nonsense. MOSFET mist lmao... Reminds of the modern day ESS glare term. That made my laugh a bit.
But to the topic.. You say they preferred esoteric/bespoke designs. Well sure, there's nothing really wrong with that from a artistic approach. But as I alluded to earlier(in contrast to mechanical watch making, or car production), it's hard to make electrical engineering sexy seeing as how PCB's are usually hidden away and such. But these people are insane to think some boutique no-name company could ever outperform the skills of doctors of electrical engineering involved in multi-billion dollar R&D projects if their teams were granted free reign on designing a top their product not destined for the mainstream market. So unless those morons who believe these boutique companies can out-do something like an instance of AP's design team asked to go wild making a cost-is-no-object performance DAC/ADC or AMP for instance... I don't even see the logic of even holding this belief EVEN IF all the advertising in the world was piled on to me in the modern day. It was okay to be blind in the advent of digital... To hold such beliefs today to me seems tantamount of thinking the Earth is flat, or the solar system's model is geocentric.
It just doesn't make sense even if you're a complete noob like me by simply looking at the fact that hyper-price sensitive multinational research departments are blowing through money like no tomorrow, are somehow going to be producing products destined for millions, and oversight/reliability expectations of a global market - and have those products somehow be inferior to some esoteric nonsense from boutique companies hiding in bushes from audio analyzers, praying no one sends in one of there devices for independent evaluation most of the time.
I don't know - I'm relatively young and just can't fathom a reason beyond ignorance, or psychosis that would lead grown adults, with life experiences doing transactions with money in their lives, to somehow hold these wildly incomprehensible beliefs. Like they won't even air on the side of caution, they go all in as if fighting as activists for their cases sometimes...